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United States Declaration of Independence

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  • United States Declaration of Independence
Jun 25 2026
Thursday 12:00 p.m. MDT    

Proclaiming Liberty with Timothy Sandefur - NM

New Mexico Lawyer Chapter

Albuquerque, NM
Speakers:
Timothy Sandefur
Sponsors:
New Mexico Lawyer Chapter • The American History & Tradition Project
  • In-Person Event
Jun 23 2026
Tuesday 2:00 p.m. EDT    

Proclaiming Liberty with Tim Sandefur

Speakers:
Timothy Sandefur • Lee J. Strang
Sponsors:
Property Rights Practice Group
  • Webinar
Jun 17 2026
Wednesday 6:00 p.m. CDT    

The Declaration and the Constitution: Foundations, Tensions, and Meaning with Judge Don Willett

Wichita Lawyer Chapter

Wichita, KS
Speakers:
Don R. Willett
Sponsors:
Wichita Lawyer Chapter • The American History & Tradition Project
  • In-Person Event
Jun 11 2026
Thursday 5:30 p.m. CDT    

The Declaration of Independence, Religion and the Law

Nebraska Lawyer Chapter

Lincoln, NE
Speakers:
Donald B. Stenberg
Sponsors:
Nebraska Lawyer Chapter • The American History & Tradition Project
  • In-Person Event
Jun 6 2026
Saturday 2:15 p.m. CDT    

Panel II: Ordered Liberty at 250: Natural Law from the Founders to Modern Courts

2026 Texas Young Lawyers Summit

Fort Worth, TX
Speakers:
Hadley P. Arkes • Daniel Burns • Conor Harvey • Matthew J. Kacsmaryk • Roger Severino
Topics:
Founding Era & History • Philosophy • State Courts
Sponsors:
Family & Parental Rights Network
  • In-Person Event
Jun 3 2026
Wednesday 5:00 p.m. MDT    

Private Freedom Plane Exhibit Viewing: Celebrating America 250 & Colorado 150

Colorado Lawyer Chapter

Denver, CO
Sponsors:
Colorado Lawyer Chapter • The American History & Tradition Project
  • In-Person Event
May 26 2026
Tuesday 12:00 p.m. PDT    

Restoring The Constitution’s Original Meaning Through The Declaration of Independence

Fresno Lawyer Chapter

Fresno, CA
Speakers:
Anastasia P. Boden
Sponsors:
Fresno Lawyer Chapter • The American History & Tradition Project
  • In-Person Event
May 6 2026
Wednesday 11:30 a.m. CDT    

The Current State of College Athletics After House v. NCAA

Memphis Lawyer Chapter

Memphis, TN
Speakers:
Ronald J. Rychlak
Sponsors:
Memphis Lawyer Chapter
  • In-Person Event
Apr 28 2026
Tuesday 11:30 a.m. PDT    

America 250- The Judicial Branch: A Look at Originalism 250 Years After the Declaration of Independence

San Diego Lawyer Chapter

San Diego, CA
Speakers:
Patrick J. Bumatay
Sponsors:
San Diego Lawyer Chapter • The American History & Tradition Project
  • In-Person Event
Apr 21 2026
Tuesday 6:00 p.m. EDT    

"Uncanceling” Thomas Jefferson: How the Forces of Wokeness Have Distorted the Record of the Author of the Declaration of Independence

Long Island Lawyer Chapter

Mineola, NY
Speakers:
Robert F. Turner
Sponsors:
Long Island Lawyer Chapter • The American History & Tradition Project
  • In-Person Event
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James Madison Portrait
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Speaker Information
Timothy Sandefur

Timothy Sandefur

Vice President for Legal Affairs, Goldwater Institute

Biography
Timothy Sandefur is the Vice President for Legal Affairs at the Goldwater Institute’s Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation and holds the Duncan Chair in Constitutional Government. He litigates to promote economic liberty, private property rights, free speech, and other crucial values in states across the country.
 
Timothy is the author of nine books, including most recently You Don’t Own Me: Individualism and the Culture of Liberty (2025), and Freedom’s Furies: How Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand Found Liberty in an Age of Darkness (2022), as well as more than 50 scholarly articles on a wide variety of legal subjects. A frequent guest on radio and television, he is well known to radio audiences as “Tim the Lawyer” on The Armstrong & Getty Show, and his writings have appeared in Reason, National Review, The Weekly Standard, The Wall Street Journal, and The Objective Standard, where he is a contributing editor. He has taught classes at Pepperdine University, McGeorge School of Law, George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, and Arizona State University, where he held the 2023-24 Barry Goldwater Chair in American Institutions.
 
He is an Adjunct Scholar with the Cato Institute and is a graduate of Hillsdale College and Chapman University School of Law.
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Speaker Information
Timothy Sandefur

Timothy Sandefur

Vice President for Legal Affairs, Goldwater Institute

Biography
Timothy Sandefur is the Vice President for Legal Affairs at the Goldwater Institute’s Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation and holds the Duncan Chair in Constitutional Government. He litigates to promote economic liberty, private property rights, free speech, and other crucial values in states across the country.
 
Timothy is the author of nine books, including most recently You Don’t Own Me: Individualism and the Culture of Liberty (2025), and Freedom’s Furies: How Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand Found Liberty in an Age of Darkness (2022), as well as more than 50 scholarly articles on a wide variety of legal subjects. A frequent guest on radio and television, he is well known to radio audiences as “Tim the Lawyer” on The Armstrong & Getty Show, and his writings have appeared in Reason, National Review, The Weekly Standard, The Wall Street Journal, and The Objective Standard, where he is a contributing editor. He has taught classes at Pepperdine University, McGeorge School of Law, George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, and Arizona State University, where he held the 2023-24 Barry Goldwater Chair in American Institutions.
 
He is an Adjunct Scholar with the Cato Institute and is a graduate of Hillsdale College and Chapman University School of Law.
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Speaker Information
Lee J. Strang

Lee J. Strang

Executive Director, Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society, The Ohio State University

Biography

Professor Lee J. Strang serves as the inaugural executive director of the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society at The Ohio State University.

Initiated in 2023 by the state of Ohio, the Chase Center will be an academic home at Ohio State for teaching, research, and programing on the foundations of the American constitutional order and its impact on society. As executive director, Professor Strang is responsible for organizing the center, overseeing the hiring and appointment of the center’s faculty, developing curriculum, and delivering student and academic programming. He also holds a faculty appointment in the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State.

Professor Strang is a nationally recognized legal scholar who has published dozens of articles in leading journals in the fields of constitutional law and interpretation, property law, and religion and the First Amendment. He co-edits the textbook Federal Constitutional Law, and his most recent book, Originalism’s Promise: A Natural Law Account of the American Constitution is the first book-length, natural law justification for originalism. He currently is writing on civic thought and leadership, and he is finalizing a book on the history of American Catholic legal education (with John M. Breen).

Before joining Ohio State, Professor Strang served as the inaugural director of the University of Toledo’s Institute of American Constitutional Thought & Leadership. He joined the Toledo College of Law faculty in 2008, was granted tenure in 2010, and was named John W. Stoepler Professor of Law & Values in 2015. The University of Toledo awarded Professor Strang its Outstanding Faculty Research and Scholarship Award in 2017. Before that, he was a visiting professor at Michigan State University College of Law. A graduate of the University of Iowa, where he was articles editor of the Iowa Law Review and Order of the Coif, Professor Strang holds an LL.M. degree from Harvard Law School.

Professor Strang has been a visiting scholar at the Georgetown Center for the Constitution and a visiting fellow at the James Madison Program at Princeton University. In 2016, he was appointed to the Ohio Advisory Committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and reappointed as chair in 2023.

Prior to teaching, Professor Strang served as a judicial clerk for Judge Alice M. Batchelder of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. He was also an associate for Jenner & Block LLP in Chicago, where he practiced in general and appellate litigation.

Professor Strang is a frequent presenter at scholarly conferences. He is the president of the Board of Trustees of Northwest Ohio Classical Academy, Ohio’s first classical charter school. He is also a regular participant in debates at law schools across the country, a contributor to the media, and a speaker to political, civic, and religious groups.

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Speaker Information
Don R. Willett

Don R. Willett

Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit

Biography

Don Willett serves on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

Before joining the federal bench, Judge Willett served 13 years on the Supreme Court
of Texas. His career spans decades of public service, including roles as legal counsel to
a Texas Attorney General, a Texas Governor, a U.S. Attorney General, and the
President of the United States. 

Raised by a heroic widowed mom in a doublewide trailer in a town of 32, Judge
Willett is his family’s first college graduate. He earned a triple-major B.B.A. from Baylor
University—where he serves on the Board of Regents—and three degrees from Duke
University—where he serves on the Board of Visitors: a J.D. with honors, an A.M. in
political science, and an LL.M. in judicial studies. After law school, he clerked on the
Fifth Circuit and practiced at Haynes and Boone before entering public service.

Judge Willett publishes widely in both leading law reviews and national media, including
The Yale Law Journal, The University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and The Wall Street
Journal. The longtime editor-in-chief of Judicature—the Scholarly Journal for Judges, he
holds academic appointments at various law schools and has received more than a
dozen Green Bag honors for “exemplary legal writing.” He was named Distinguished
Jurist of the Year by the Texas Review of Law & Politics, and he is a member of the
American Law Institute and a Life Fellow of the American, Texas, and Austin Bar
Foundations.

A onetime bull rider and professional drummer, Judge Willett was named “Tweeter
Laureate of Texas” in 2015. He is the namesake of Don R. Willett Elementary
School—home of mighty Willett Wranglers—located just a mile from where he grew up.
He and his radiant wife, Tiffany have three children—Jacob, Shane-David, and
Geneviève—plus the family pup, Amicus.

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Speaker Information
Donald B. Stenberg

Donald B. Stenberg

Of Counsel, Erickson & Sederstrom

Biography

Professional Positions
Former Member of National Association of Attorneys General Executive Committee (2002)
Member, Society of Attorneys General Emeritus (SAGE)
Washington Legal Foundation, Policy Advisory Board
Federalist Society, Member of the Federalism Subcommittee for Federalism and Separation of Powers
Former Member, TRANSLink Transmission Co., Board of Directors
Former Member, U.S. Chamber of Commerce Federalism Working Group
Former Chair, Nebraska Crime Commission

Honors and Accomplishments
Argued cases in the United States Supreme Court
Phi Beta Kappa
Republican Nominee for U.S. Senate in Nebraska (2000)
Founding Member of the Republican Attorneys General Association
Nebraska Fertilizer and Ag Chemical Institute's Government Official of the Year (2000)
Nebraska Coalition for Victims of Crime's Public Policy Award (1999)
Lincoln Independent Business Association's Business Champion Award (1997)
Lincoln Jaycees Outstanding Young Individual Award (1981)

Prior to Becoming of Counsel to Erickson & Sederstrom, P.C.
Attorney General of Nebraska (1991-2003)
Legal Counsel to the Governor of Nebraska (1979-1983)



University of Nebraska, Lincoln, B.A. (1970)
Harvard Business School, M.B.A. (1974)
Harvard Law School, J.D. (cum laude) (1974)

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Speaker Information
Hadley P. Arkes

Hadley P. Arkes

Founder and Director, James Wilson Institute on Natural Rights & the American Founding

Biography

Hadley Arkes joined the faculty of Amherst College in 1966. He became the Edward Ney Professor of Jurisprudence in 1987, and held that chair until he retired officially in July 2015. But he has not retired from writing and speaking. He has carried that teaching into a new phase; he has become the Founder and Director of the James Wilson Institute on Natural Rights and the American Founding in Washington, D.C. He has written eight books, mostly with Princeton and Cambridge University Presss. Among the books at Princeton have been: The Philosopher in the City (1981), First Things (1986), Beyond the Constitution (1990), and The Return of George Sutherland (1994). With Cambridge Press he has done Natural Rights and the Right to Choose (2002), and Constitutional Illusions & Anchoring Truths: The Touchstone of the Natural Law (2010). His most recent book, with Regnery Press is Mere Natural Law (2023) His articles have appeared in professional journals, but apart from his writing in more scholarly formats, he has become known to a wider audience through his writings in the Wall Street Journal, National Review, Civitas and First Things, a journal that took its name from his book of that title.

He was the main advocate, and architect, of the bill that became known as the Born-Alive Infants’ Protection Act. The account of his experience, in moving the bill through Congress, is contained as an epilogue or memoir in his book, Natural Rights & the Right to Choose. Arkes first prepared his proposal as part of the debating kit assembled for the first George Bush in 1988. The purpose of that proposal was to offer the “most modest first step” of all in legislating on abortion, and opening a conversation even with people who called themselves “pro-choice.” Professor Arkes proposed to begin simply by preserving the life of a child who survived an abortion–contrary to the holding of one federal judge, that such a child was not protected by the laws. Professor Arkes led the testimony on the bill before the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. House in July 2000, then again in July 2001. The legislative calendar was upended in the aftermath of September 11th, but in March 2002, the bill was brought to the floor of the House, where it passed unanimously. To the surprise of Professor Arkes, the bill was brought to the floor of the Senate on July 18 by the Deputy Majority Leader, Harry Reid, and passed in the same way. On August 5, President Bush signed the bill into law with Professor Arkes in attendance.

Professor Arkes was the founder, at Amherst, of the Committee for the American Founding, a group of alumni and students seeking to preserve, at Amherst, the doctrines of “natural rights” taught by the American Founders and Lincoln. That interest has been carried over now to the founding of a new center for the jurisprudence of natural law, in Washington, D.C.: the James Wilson Institute on Natural Rights and the American Founding, named for one of the premier minds among the American Founders. Professor Arkes has drawn to this project a cluster of accomplished federal judges who have wanted to get a firmer hold on the natural law, and brought them together with some gifted teachers of philosophy and law. The new institute will be sponsoring lectures and seminars in Washington and other parts of the country. The purpose of this new James Wilson Institute is to teach anew, to lawyers, judges, and students those principles of law that furnished the guide to the American Founders as they set about framing a Constitution. And the hope is to restore, to a new generation, the furnishings of mind of the men who formed this regime.

 

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Speaker Information
Daniel Burns

Daniel Burns

Associate Professor of Politics, University of Dallas

Biography

Daniel Burns is Associate Professor of Politics at the University of Dallas, where he has taught since 2012, and where he served in 2020-21 as Interim Associate Dean of the College of Liberal Arts. He has held visiting fellowships at the University of Texas at Austin and the Catholic University of America. He received his doctorate in political science from Boston College in 2012 and his B.A. in political science from Williams College in 2006.

Prof. Burns’s research in the history of political thought focuses on the relation between religion and citizenship, especially in the writings of Plato, Cicero, Augustine, al-Farabi, John Locke, the American founding generation, and Joseph Ratzinger. His first book, Augustine’s Philosophy of Law, is forthcoming this year from Cambridge University Press. He is completing a book on Joseph Ratzinger's model for church-state relations in modern liberal democracies.

During a year of academic leave in 2019-2020, Prof. Burns served as Deputy Director of the U.S Congress's Joint Economic Committee, and then as Senior Policy Analyst (contractor) at the Office for Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. He has been a Contributing Editor at Public Discourse, and his writings have appeared in outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The American Interest, National Affairs, America Magazine, National Review, and First Things.

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Speaker Information
Conor Harvey

Conor Harvey

Associate, Wright Close & Barger, LLP

Biography

Conor is a highly motivated, creative, and seasoned lawyer, with a level of courtroom experience usually found in lawyers far more senior. He has significant appellate skills, deep knowledge of the Texas Supreme Court, and outstanding analytical and writing abilities. Conor has handled every stage of civil litigation, including drafting initial pleadings and answers, seeking and repelling discovery, taking and defending depositions, and handling high-stakes claims and defenses at trial. Conor brings keen insights and innovative legal arguments to all his cases.

An eighth-generation Texan born and raised in Houston, Conor’s devotion to Texas runs deep. Appointed by Governor Abbott and confirmed by the Texas Senate, he serves as a commissioner of the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement, the statewide agency of more than 130 employees that sets and enforces standards that ensure the citizens of Texas are served by highly trained and ethical law enforcement, corrections, and telecommunications personnel.

Conor also maintains an active pro bono practice focusing on religious liberty disputes.

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Matthew J. Kacsmaryk

Matthew J. Kacsmaryk

District Judge, United States District Court, Northern District of Texas

Biography

Matthew J. Kacsmaryk serves as United States District Judge for the Northern District of Texas.
He previously served in the (1) private, (2) government, and (3) nonprofit sectors:

  • Associate in the Dallas office of Baker Botts LLP
  • Assistant United States Attorney for the Northern District of Texas
  • Deputy General Counsel to the First Liberty Institute

Judge Kacsmaryk is an Honors graduate of the University of Texas Law School, where he joined the Federalist Society and served as an Executive Editor of the Texas Review of Law & Politics. Judge Kacsmaryk co-founded the Fort Worth Lawyers Chapter in 2012, coordinated the 2018 Texas Chapters Conference hosted by the Fort Worth Lawyers Chapter, and presently serves on its Advisory Board.

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Speaker Information
Roger Severino

Roger Severino

Vice President of Domestic and Economic Policy, The Heritage Foundation

Biography

Roger Severino is Vice President of Economic and Domestic Policy, and the Joseph C. and Elizabeth A. Anderlik Fellow at The Heritage Foundation. 

Severino is a national authority on civil rights, conscience and religious freedom, the administrative state, and information privacy, particularly as applied to health care law and policy. Find his tweets at @RogerSeverino_.

Severino spearheaded the HHS Accountability Project while a Senior Fellow at EPPC from 2021 to 2023. Previously, Severino was Director of HHS’ Office for Civil Rights, where he led a team of over 250 staff enforcing our nation’s civil rights, conscience and religious freedom, and health information privacy laws. He served from 2017 to 2021 and was the longest-serving OCR director of the past three decades.

Prior to joining HHS, Severino served for two years as Director of the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at Heritage, advocating for life, family, and religious-freedom policies. Before that, he was a trial attorney for seven years at the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division where he enforced the Fair Housing Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Severino started his legal career at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, where he was Legal Counsel and Chief Operations Officer and defended the rights of people of all faiths under federal and international law.

Severino has been profiled in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and The Hill and has appeared on Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and PBS, among others. In 2020, The New York Times dubbed him and his wife Carrie, “a conservative power couple” to be reckoned with.

Severino holds a JD from Harvard Law School, a master’s degree in public policy, with highest distinction, from Carnegie Mellon University, and a bachelor’s degree in business from the University of Southern California. He was appointed by President Trump to the Administrative Conference of the United States and is a member of the District of Columbia and the Commonwealth of Virginia bars.

As OCR director, Severino founded the federal government’s first division dedicated exclusively to conscience and religious freedom compliance and enforcement. He enforced the Weldon Amendment for the first time against a state (California) after it coerced families and religious organizations into paying for abortion insurance coverage, leading to a $200 million federal funding disallowance. He also enforced laws protecting pro-life pregnancy resource centers from discrimination by states hostile to their message and enforced laws prohibiting forced participation in abortions by medical professionals.

With respect to civil rights, Severino protected older persons and people with disabilities from being denied life-saving care due to discriminatory “quality of life” judgments, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. He also achieved a landmark sexual harassment resolution with Michigan State University in the wake of the Larry Nassar sexual assault scandal and protected the rights of non-English speakers to have equal access to health and human services.

In the area of health privacy, he secured the largest HIPAA monetary settlement in history and achieved the largest number of enforcement resolutions both in a single year and across four years. He also facilitated the transformational use of Skype, Zoom, and Facetime for delivery of telehealth during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.

His regulatory reform activities resulted in a comprehensive conscience protection regulation and proposed a life-affirming disability rights regulation. He achieved regulatory savings of $3.6 billion in health care industry costs over five years and identified and proposed an additional $3.2 billion in cost savings from the repeal of ineffective and unnecessary regulatory burdens.

Severino is a Spanish speaker who teaches salsa and west coast swing in his spare time.

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Anastasia P. Boden

Anastasia P. Boden

Constitutional Scholarship Director and Senior Legal Analyst, Pacific Legal Foundation

Biography

Anastasia Boden is Director of Constitutional Scholarship at Pacific Legal Foundation, where she leads the organization’s Supreme Court commentary and directs scholarly analysis in support of the firm’s litigation. She has represented entrepreneurs and small businesses nationwide in challenges to onerous licensing regimes, anti-competitive titling restrictions, Certificate of Need (“competitor’s veto”) laws, and other forms of unnecessary red tape that block economic opportunity.

Prior to this role, Anastasia developed nearly a dozen constitutional challenges to Certificate of Need laws across the country, helping spur legislative reform in Montana, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. Her victories include a ruling invalidating Houston’s busking restrictions, multiple appellate decisions expanding access to the courts for civil rights plaintiffs, and the legislative repeal of Virginia’s happy-hour advertising ban.

Her writings on law and liberty have been featured in USA Today, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Forbes, and more, and she has appeared on Headline News, CBS News, Fox News, ReasonTV, Newsmax, and John Stossel. In 2020, she was featured on Libertarian Party presidential candidate Jo Jorgensen’s Supreme Court shortlist. 

Anastasia earned her BA with dean’s honors from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and her JD from Georgetown University Law Center, where she was research assistant to Professor Randy E. Barnett—the “intellectual godfather” of the constitutional challenge to Obamacare. She is the co-creator of the podcast Dissed, about infamous Supreme Court dissents.  She authors the biweekly newsletter SCOTUS Scoop and the column, “In Dissent” for SCOTUSblog.

 

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Ronald J. Rychlak

Ronald J. Rychlak

Distinguished Professor of Law, Jamie L. Whitten Chair of Law and Government, University of Mississippi School of Law

Biography

Professor Ronald J. Rychlak is the Jamie L. Whitten Chair of Law and Government and Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Mississippi. He is a legal advisor to the Holy See’s delegation to the United Nations and chair of the Mississippi Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. He serves as the university’s Faculty Athletic Representative and is on the executive committee of the Southeastern Conference (SEC). In 2019 he received the university’s highest research and publication recognition, the “Distinguished Research and Creative Achievement Award” based upon his reputation for scholarly activity and leadership roles in professional societies. In 2023, he received the Algernon Sydney Sullivan Award, the University’s highest award in honor of service, for “placing service to others and the community before oneself, while embodying the qualities of honesty, morality, ethics, integrity, responsibility, determination, courage, and compassion.” In 2024, he was voted “Outstanding Law Professor” by the law school student body. 

Ron is the author, co-author, or editor of twelve books and over 100 articles. The Congregation for the Causes of Saints at the Vatican called his book, Hitler, the War, and the Pope “definitive” in its response to charges made against the leader of the Catholic Church during World War II. He has been published in Notre Dame Law Review, UCLA Law Review, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and numerous other periodicals and journals. Media appearances include CNN, ABC, Fox News, The National Geographic TV Network, The Military Channel, C-SPAN, and more. 

Ron and his wife Claire are proud of their six children, two sons-in-law, one daughter-in-law, and three granddaughters. They live in Oxford, Mississippi.


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Patrick J. Bumatay

Patrick J. Bumatay

Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit

Biography

Patrick J. Bumatay was confirmed as a U.S. Circuit Judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in December 2019. He is based in San Diego, California.

Prior to his appointment, Judge Bumatay served as an Assistant United States Attorney in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of California, where he was a member of the Appellate and Narcotics Sections. He also served as a Counselor to the Attorney General on criminal law issues, including on national opioid strategy and combating transnational organized crime. Judge Bumatay has also worked in the Office of the Deputy Attorney General, the Office of the Associate Attorney General, and the Office of Legal Policy at the U.S. Department of Justice. Judge Bumatay has twice received the Attorney General’s Distinguished Service Award.

Judge Bumatay previously worked as an associate at Morvillo, Abramowitz, Grand, Iason, and Bohrer in New York, New York. Judge Bumatay clerked for the Honorable Timothy M. Tymkovich of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit and the Honorable Sandra L. Townes of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York. Judge Bumatay earned his B.A., cum laude, from Yale University and his J.D. from Harvard Law School.

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Robert F. Turner

Robert F. Turner

Senior Fellow, National Security Institute, Antonin Scalia School of Law, George Mason University; Retired Professor, Distinguished Fellow and Co-Founder, Center for National Security Law, University of Virginia School of Law (1987-2020)

Biography

Robert F. Turner holds both professional and academic doctorates from the University of Virginia School of Law. He co-founded the Center for National Security Law with Professor John Norton Moore in April 1981 and served as its associate director for 39 years, except for two periods of government service in the 1980s and during 1994-95, when he occupied the Charles H. Stockton Chair of International Law at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. He retired from UVA in January 2020 and currently serves as a non-resident senior fellow at the GMU National Security Institute. He also served briefly in 2020 as President of the Crime Prevention Research Center—one of the most respected pro-Second Amendment groups in the country—while its founder, Dr. John Lott, was on leave of absence.

A former Army captain and veteran of two tours in Vietnam, Turner served as a research associate and public affairs fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace before spending five years in the mid-1970s as national security adviser to U.S. Senator Robert P. Griffin,  a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (where Turner anticipated by seven years the Supreme Court’s landmark INS v. Chadha decision, striking down legislative vetoes). He also served in the executive branch during the Reagan administration as a member of the Senior Executive Service, first in the Pentagon as special assistant to the undersecretary of defense for policy, then in the White House as counsel to the President's Intelligence Oversight Board, and at the State Department as principal deputy and then acting assistant secretary for legislative affairs. In 1986, he became the first president of the congressionally established United States Institute of Peace.

A former three-term chairman of the ABA Standing Committee on Law and National Security (and for many years editor of the ABA National Security Law Report), Turner also chaired the Executive-Congressional Relations Subcommittee of the ABA Section on International Law and Practice and chaired or co-chaired the National Security Law Subcommittee of the Federalist Society’s International and National Security Law Practice Group for several years.

Turner taught undergraduate courses at Virginia on international law, U.S. foreign policy, the Vietnam War and foreign policy and the law in what is now the Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics. In addition, he co-taught National Security Law and advanced national security law seminars on the Indochina War and on war and peace with Moore at the Law School.

The author or editor of 17 books and monographs (including co-editor of the Center's 1,600-page National Security Law & Policy casebook, National Security Law Documents, and Legal Issues in the Struggle Against Terror) and numerous articles in law reviews and other professional journals, Turner has also contributed articles to most of the major U.S. newspapers, including The New York Times and USA Today. In an op-ed published in The International Herald Tribune in September 1990, he and Moore were the first to call for a war-crimes trial for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and for international controls over Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, and the following month he wrote the lead story in The Washington Post Sunday Outlook Section, “Killing Saddam: Would It Be a Crime?,”  arguing that Hussein would be a lawful target during Operation Desert Storm. (His reasoning contributed to the modern legal justification for drone strikes targeting specific terrorist leaders.) Three years before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Turner published an op-ed in USA Today entitled: “In Self-defense, U.S. Has Right to Kill bin Laden.” 

 

In July 2007, he co-authored an article in The Washington Post with former U.S. Marine Corps Commandant General P.X. Kelley, “War Crimes and the White House,” criticizing the use of unlawful “enhanced interrogation techniques” by the Central Intelligence Agency. On the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon he authored an article in The Wall Street Journal,  “Saigon’s Fall Still Echoes Today,”  noting that after the war ended, Hanoi admitted it had made a decision in 1959 to open the Ho Chi Minh Trail and start sending troops, weapons and supplies into South Vietnam to overthrow its government — just as the United States had charged. In 2010 Turner received the first “person of the year” award from SACEI, a major Vietnamese-American human rights organization.

A frequent lecturer and debater, Turner has spoken at more than 100 law schools around the nation and in other fora — taking on as many as four opponents at a time. His debate opponents have included former or future deans of Yale, Stanford, the University of Chicago and Berkeley law schools. Following a 1987 debate against Dean Harlan Cleveland (Rhodes Scholar, U.S. Ambassador to NATO, and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient) in which Turner defended the legality of U.S. support for the Nicaraguan contras during the Reagan Administration, the host student debating societies awarded Turner the victory by an 85-to-15 percent margin.

Turner has also written and lectured widely on University of Virginia founder and America’s third president Thomas Jefferson.  In 2000-2001 he chaired the Jefferson-Hemings Scholars Commission.  In his 2012 book Master of the Mountain, Jefferson critic Henry Wiencek described Turner as “Jefferson’s chief scholarly defender."

A former distinguished lecturer at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Turner is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Academy of Political Science, the Committee on the Present Danger, The Heterodox Academy, and other professional organizations.  He maintained a 4.0 gpa as a graduate student at Stanford in History and Political Science and in the UVA Department of Government and Foreign Affairs and was the first person admitted directly to the UVA academic law doctorate (SJD) program without first being required to earn an LL.M. master’s degree.  He was selected for inclusion in Who’s Who in American Law less than two years after graduating from law school and Who’s Who in the World before he reached the age of 40. Turner has testified before more than a dozen different congressional committees on issues of international or constitutional law and other topics.

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